Harper Goff's Nautilus as the Genesis of Steampunk

I know I said I wouldn't be posting, but this section of the dissertation felt like a self-encapsulated post, so I'm sharing it with y'all. Sorry I didn't have time to include a works cited at the bottom. I'll try to get to that when the big work is done.

Steampunk’s distant antecedents and inspiration obviously
lie in the fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian period. Powers, Blaylock, and
Jeter all admit to drawing from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor; Blaylock articulated further
particular inspirations from other Victorian writers:

Homunculus was
simply a variety of historical novel that I had written largely because I was
crazy for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde and because I had grown up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells,
and my idea of science fiction had always had to do with backyard scientists
and fabulous submarines and spacecraft that housed onboard greenhouses. (468)

While H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are often cited as the most
likely nineteenth century precursors to steampunk, they are only the two most obvious
candidates. H.G. Wells’s influence is glaringly obvious in steampunk, starting
with Jeter’s recursive-fantasy Morlock Night and Christopher Priest’s The
Space Machine, since both are ostensible sequels to Wells’ The Time
Machine.

As a marriage of urban fantasy and the alternate-world
tradition can arguably be traced back to the influence of Charles Dickens,
whose vision of a labyrinthine, subaqueous London as moronic inferno underlies
many later texts. Dickens’s London, somewhat sanitized, also underlies the
Babylon-on-the-Thames version of the great city created by authors like Robert
Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and G.K. Chesterton in their
fantasies—tales whose uneasy theodicy underpins much contemporary gaslight
romance. The two categories, steampunk and gaslight romance, point to two ways
of rendering closely linked original material. (Clute“Steampunk” 895)

While written texts cannot be ignored as steampunk’s
literary ancestors, the proliferation of cinematic adaptations of Victorian
Scientific Romances following the success of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea in 1954 seem a more likely reason for steampunk’s popularity. A
nostalgic longing akin to the one Jameson speaks of regarding Star Wars
is ostensibly in play for those whose Saturday matinee experience involved the
twenty years between 1951 and 1971, when “an average of at least one new Verne
film was released annually” (Taves 227), along with numerous adaptations of the
works of H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In “A
History of Misapplied Technology: The History and Development of the Steampunk Genre,”
Cory Gross charts the proliferation of these “Retro-Victorian Scientific
Fantasies,” noting how “Disneyland itself would be infused with Disney’s
nostalgia for the turn of the 20th century”:

. . . upon entering the park, the visitor must travel up a
recreated Victorian American main street, or load on to one of the narrow-gauge
steam trains. Perhaps, in addition to recognizing the capacity of Science
Fiction to be serious entertainment, [Disney] also recognized that the
Victorian Era was changing from the backwards past of our fathers to the gilded
fairyland of our ancestors. (55-57)

In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, Jameson calls these types of movies nostalgia films, and
his description of them is strikingly similar to the way I envision steampunk’s
evocation of the nineteenth century:

. . . the nostalgia film was never a matter of some old-fashioned
“representation” of historical content, but instead approached the “past”
through stylistic connotation, conveying “pastness” by the glossy qualities of
the image, and “1930s-ness” or “1950s-ness” by the attributes of fashion. (19)

Taking Greg Bear’s suggestion concerning Disney’s
Nautilus, it is likely that film adaptations of Verne’s works had as significant
an impact on steampunk as the original works they derive from. In “Hollywood’s
Jules Verne” from The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, Brian Taves argues that “Today,
any Verne enthusiast’s reading of the original works is bound to be intertwined
with viewing the films. The Vernian “text” is no longer simply his novels, but
the accumulation of impressions gained through many versions in the performing
arts” (205). Richard Fleischer, director of the 1954 version of 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea believed the Disney film to be the version of Verne’s
story “known today by most young people” (Frazier and Hathorne 39).
Anecdotally, I find that most people who say they are a fan of Verne are
referring to the film adapations, not the books. Taking this idea a step
further, it seems likely that the seminal steampunk writers of the ‘70s and
‘80s were inspired as much by these cinematic adaptations as they were by
Verne’s original texts. Taves chronicles the prolific period of production of
Vernian cinema prior to the emergence of steampunk texts in the 1970s:

“For twenty years, from 1951-1971, an average of at least
one new Verne film was released annually. The peak year was 1961, when four
Hollywood Verne movies were released, as well as several imports, along with
television broadcasts” (227).

Taves’ study is limited solely to filmic adaptations of
Verne’s works, but the popularity of Verne adaptations gave rise to other
celluloid period SF films, such as George Pal’s version of Wells’ The Time
Machine (1960) and First Men in the Moon (1964), and Kevin
O’Connor’s Edgar Rice Burrough’s adaptations: The Land that Time Forgot
(1975), At the Earth’s Core (1976), and The People That Time Forgot
(1977). In addition to adaptation, many original films capitalizing on the
popularity of the fantastic Victorian or Edwardian setting were made: The
Great Race (1965), Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines
(1965), The Lost Continent (1968), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
(1968), Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969), and Warlords of
Atlantis (1978).

The
impact of these films are often overlooked in brief histories of steampunk:
Jeff and Ann Vandermeer leap from the “proto-steampunk” of the Victorian and
Edwardian age to the 1970s and the emergence of “a true Godfather of modern
steampunk,” Michael Moorcock (2010: 9). Gevers likewise jumps from “the period
literature that steampunk references” to Moorcock (9). Cory Gross is one of the
few writers who pays it adequate attention in his article “A History of
Misapplied Technology: A History and Development of the Steampunk Genre.”

Yet it
warrants attention in understanding the influences that shaped steampunk,
especially if we take seriously Greg Bear’s contention that steampunk starts
with Harper Goff’s Nautilus, along with public perception of Verne’s
stories being influenced more by the cinematic versions than the original
tales. The design aesthetic informing the drastic differences between Verne’s Nautilus
and Goff’s version are critically evaluated by James Maertens in his article
contrasting the novel and the film.

[Goff’s] decision to make a baroque Nautilus that looked
like the Loch Ness monster was probably a wise choice from the standpoint of
the film medium because it did produce a visually fascinating design that
enhanced the sense of mystery and wonder surrounding the vessel. But it is more
interesting as an interpretation of the Victorian Age than as a
representation of Verne’s submarine design. The Victorian Age is mythologized
as a period in which wealth and technical power were combined. Acquisition,
industry, and individualism all merge in the image of the high-speed machine
appointed in velvet and brass. Glimpsed only fleetingly at various points
during the film, Goff’s Nautilus exteriors tantalize the eye of the viewer and
give the same impression of elegant power as the rich interiors with their specimen
cases, draperies, and polished brass instruments. This interior opulence is
certainly not a departure from the comfortable submarine-yacht designed by
Verne, but the extension of the baroque to the exterior of the ship and
its machinery is. (Maertens 212-213 emphasis added)

Goff told Disney that he imagined Captain Nemo putting the
cinematic Nautilus together “hastily and roughly” using the “only
material available . . . the rough iron . . . salvaged from wrecks” (Frazier
and Hathorne 35, 40). As such, the Nautilus
design is a visual encapsulation of the steampunk aesthetic – the evocation of
the past mediated by a backward gaze. In contrast to Goff’s fantastic metal
beast meant to signify the industrial style of a previous century, Verne’s Nautilus
is hydrodynamic, a plausibly utilitarian design. Goff’s Nautilus evokes a sense of the past in a
way a sleek, cigar-shaped cylinder couldn’t have to 1954 audiences recently
enamored by the advent of the real world namesake of Nemo’s ship, the nuclear
submarine USSNautilus. Unlike the sleek design of the real-world Nautilus, the hull of Goff’s design is
rust-colored, further supporting his concept of the cinematic Nautilus
being a hodge-podge slap-together of available, less-than-superior materials.
To a 1954 audience, its shape was reminiscent of nineteenth century ironclads,
a mosaic of metal plates held together by thousands of rivets.

The
influence of Goff’s Nautilus is
evidenced directly in four particular steampunk works: Thomas F. Moteleone’s The Secret Sea (1979), Joe Lansdale’s Zeppelins West (2001), Kevin J. Anderson’s
Captain Nemo: The Fanastic Adventures of
a Dark Genius (2002), and Mark Mellon’s Napoleon
Concerto (2009). In The Secret Sea,
Monteleone describes the prow of the Nautilus
as “a jagged sawtooth edge,” and its conning tower as resembling “the head of a
nasty sea-creature” (67). Likewise, in his parody of Nemo and the Nautilus, Lansdale describes a great
dorsal fin like an enormous shark or prehistoric fish, with the “eyes of the
fish” being “a great, tinted, double-bubbled water shield” (58). The cover
illustration of the tale’s “Naughty Lass”
is an obvious homage to Goff. Mark Mellon, despite trying to achieve greater
historical verisimilitude in his alternate history of Robert Fulton, whose
real-world Nautilus was the world’s
first functional submarine, describes his ship-wrecking war-machine with
several nods to Goff:

Iron plates were bolted onto the wooden armature, laid fore
to aft in overlapped layers like dragon scales. Glass eyes fixed in the beak,
protected by a lattice of steel bars, accentuated the strange new ship’s distinctly
reptilian appearance. (72)

The new armored vessel lay like a half-submerged predatory
fish tied up against the pilings. Eyelike portholes made of thick glass stared
from the control bridge within the bow. Overlapping armor plates reminded him
of the scales of the shark he had fought while adrift on a raft of flotsam from
the Coralie. Jagged fins like saw-teeth
lined the dorsal hull, the better for causing severe damage to wooden-keeled
ships traversing the Suez. (355)

All of these
descriptions are closer to Goff’s design of the Nautilus than Verne’s original, which while initially mistaken for
a sea-creature, cannot be mistaken as such close up, as Professor Aronnax
discovers when first washed up upon the submarine vessel’s hull: “That blackish
back on which I was sitting was glossy and smooth, with nothing like overlapping scales” (47, emphasis added). While Aronnax
first imagines the ship as shaped “like an immense steel fish” (48), Nemo
clarifies that it is an exceedingly practical shape for ocean travel: a 70-metre
long cigar-shaped cylinder (84).

The
influence of Goff’s Nautilus on the
steampunk aesthetic is seen further in the proliferation of Nautilus designs at a websitecataloguing designs that don't depart drastically from Verne's vision, as in
the case of the League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen. While there are many which hold to Verne’s spartan design, there
are many that are clearly using Goff’s design as their starting point. The
online catalogue’s inclusion of these designs verifies Fleischer’s claim
concerning the influence of the cinematic Leagues,
which in many ways eclipses the novel in the popular imagination.

Anecdotally,
nearly every steampunk convention I have attended has featured items in the
vendor or artist halls clearly based on Goff’s design. The Vulcania Volunteers
are a group of artists and craftsmen devoted solely to producing replica models
and blueprints inspired by Goff’s design of The
Nautilus. More obliquely, the “variety of disparate materials that can
usually be found in any Steampunk conceived of device . . . wood, brass, rivets,
gears, lenses, cast iron, etc,” (Sean Orlando, Kineticsteamworks.org) are found
in Goff’s design. Take a Google perusal of steampunk art and compare it with
Goff’s Nautilus and you’ll see what I
mean. As Don Peri stated in Working with Walt, “Harper Goff is not widely known, but he left an indelible mark with his design of the Nautilus…” (193).

Generally speaking, I don't consider Disney's 20,000 Leagues film to be a Steampunk film (with more details available via the article I wrote, which I don't feel like finding at the moment), but I'd be willing to accept the actual, physical design of the Nautilus itself to be a piece of Steampunk art featured in the film.

I teach English full-time at MacEwan University, research steampunk and speculative literature, and giant monsters. I speak at cons and conferences, and draw and write in my spare time.
I am as avid a FRPG player as one can be with kids, a wife, and a yard.

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